The 2018 Conference on Medicine and Religion asks, “Is contemporary medicine beholden to philosophical commitments that are rivals to or in harmony with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other world religions?” This panel begins with the widely shared observation that today’s medicine, which we will call the New Medicine, is beholden to philosophical commitments that not only are rivals to, but which directly contradict, the commitments of the Abrahamic religions. The New Medicine is committed to medicine being, at its foundation, an intrinsically amoral practice of providing health care services to those authorized to request them, and doing so according to the broader norm of maximizing the patient’s “well-being” according to the patient’s subjective preferences. That conclusion all of the panelists share.

What is not so obvious, however, is how to answer two other questions raised by the Conference directors: Should religious communities develop their own understandings and practices of the healing arts? Do medicine and religion share foundations on which they can build and work together?

In this panel, the coauthors of a forthcoming book provisionally titled, Good Medicine: Healthcare’s Enduring Ethic, will argue that medical practitioners have recourse to a moral foundation for medicine that Christians can affirm as shared with those who are not Christians. Put differently, they will argue that medicine has a rational foundation which Christians can and should affirm, but which Jews and Muslims and even Atheists also can and should (and often do) affirm, at least in the ways they practice and make use of medicine.

That foundation is found in the basic human goods, and, for medicine in particular, in the good of the patient’s health. If the authors’ argument succeeds, then Christians should build their faithful practices of medicine on this moral foundation. In doing so, they would embrace what the authors call the Traditional Approach to Medicine and Medical Ethics.

In the Traditional Approach, the authors argue, medicine is a rational practice constitutively oriented toward the patient’s health, where health is an objective human norm that unequivocally contributes to patient flourishing. Medical practitioners pursue the patient’s health while respecting the requirements of the moral law (the natural law). Those requirements include never intentionally damaging or destroying health or any other basic good, but they also include pursuing health and other goods in ways that are fair to others. Finally, germane to medicine, the requirements of practical reason (another name for the natural law) include making reasonable commitments, such as the commitments included in a physician’s profession, as well as respecting the particular obligations (and freedoms) those commitments generate.

A foundation is the first part of a structure, not its whole, and Christians have good reason to recover, sustain, and “develop their own understandings and practices of the healing arts” in order to bear fuller witness to the truth found in Jesus Christ. But in doing so, these two authors claim, Christians build on a moral foundation that can and should be embraced (and often is embraced) by Jews, Muslims, those of other religious traditions, and even those who deny any religious tradition. This shared foundation gives medical practitioners from communities shaped by diverse and mutually incompatible religious and moral commitments a limited but real basis for working together.

We take this proposal to be controversial, first because it directly challenges the philosophical foundations of the New Medicine, but also because it is challenged even among those who decry the New Medicine. The proposal raises questions about the history—some might say the ‘genealogy’—of medicine: is there a “tradition” of medical practice, oriented toward particular goods, that can be identified, embraced, and built upon? Moreover, for Christians, the proposal raises central theological questions about the capacity of human reason, the effects of sin and grace on that capacity, and the basis and content of specifically Christian morality.

The book’s authors, one trained in medicine and the other in philosophy, both are inclined to agree with the ways that (Roman) Catholic theology answers these theological questions, but they recognize that not all of their colleagues will agree with their take on the history of medicine and their interpretation of Catholic moral theology, much less will all agree with Catholic theology where other streams of Christian thought depart from it. We are, after all, 500 years post Protestant Reformation.

In the second half of the panel, therefore, two Protestant scholars will respond. One respondent is a theologian whose work focuses on health care. One respondent is a physician with graduate training in theology. Each will critically engage the book’s proposal, giving their assessment of whether the book’s argument holds together, whether it aligns with Christian theology rightly understood, and to what extent Christians who disagree with the authors on relevant theological questions might still embrace (even if for other reasons) the Traditional Approach to Medicine. The respondents will indicate the lines along which they would revise or amend the shape of the Traditional Approach to make it more congruent with Christian practice.